"Project Nim," a new documentary by James Marsh, is a probing, unsettling
study of primate behavior, focusing on the complex dynamics of power, sex
and group bonding in a species whose startling capacity for selfishness and
aggression is offset by occasional displays of intelligence and compassion.

The movie also features a chimpanzee.

His name -- a human imposition, like everything else in this creature's
remarkable, heartbreaking life -- is Nim Chimpsky. In the 1970s he enjoyed
(or endured) a season of fame as a research subject. Shortly after his birth
at an Oklahoma laboratory, Nim was taken from his mother's side and
delivered to New York, where he became part of an experiment, led by a
Columbia professor, Herbert Terrace, to determine whether an ape could be
taught human language.

It is a bit curious that Mr. Marsh's film has nothing to say about the
roots of Nim's name, a jab at the influential linguist
Noam Chomsky,
whose theories about the innateness and uniqueness of language to humans
were the implicit target of Dr. Terrace's work. His project was an effort to
discern if a chimpanzee could learn sign language and if that learning could
proceed beyond the mimicry of specific gestures into the creation of
grammatical sentences. If Nim could be raised more or less as a human child,
and could master human communication, that would challenge the Chomskyan
idea of language as a special, hard-wired trait fundamentally separating us
from other animals. (Kokothe gorilla, another celebrated signing ape born around the same
time as Nim, also tested this hypothesis.)

"Project Nim" glances briefly at the scientific controversy that shaped
Nim's fate, but Mr. Marsh is less interested in comparatively dry matters of
linguistics or neurobiology than in a humid, messy domain of identity and
emotion that has, in the past, been the terrain of psychoanalysis. And of
literature: Nim, thrown from one home to another, vulnerable to cruelty and
neglect and dependent on the kindness of strangers, resembles the titular
hero of a Dickens novel, an orphan buffeted by circumstances whose biography
is also a fable of individual virtue and social injustice.

A helpless innocent compared with his protectors and tormentors, Nim
bounces like a long-armed David Copperfield from one unnatural home to
another -- a Manhattan brownstone, an estate in the Bronx, a medical testing
center upstate -- living through periods of pastoral bliss and gothic horror.
His tale is Dickensian, but also Kafkaesque, since he is at the mercy of
powerful forces beyond his ken or control.

Red Peter, the learned ape in Kafka's devastating "Report
to an Academy," dreams, above all else, of a "way out," and to watch
footage of the young Nim at play and in confinement is to infer that he must
have known a similar longing. Unlike the Kafka character, however, this
educated primate never acquired enough words to tell us his story, and so
"Project Nim" relies on human interlocutors, some of whom cared about Nim a
great deal, almost all of whom wind up telling us more about themselves.

They are a remarkable collection, often at odds and sometimes in bed with
one another, with Nim as their pawn, rival or surrogate child as well as the
blank slate on which they inscribe their fantasies and intellectual
conceits. Dr. Terrace, speaking with precision and detachment in present-day
interviews, is either resigned to being the film's designated villain or
oblivious to being set up for that role. His former colleagues, some of them
also former lovers, don't have much good to say, and the '70s footage,
showing an academic dandy with a comb-over, a BMW and a Burt Reynolds
mustache, is hardly flattering.

For the first few years of Nim's life, Dr. Terrace was the master of his
fate, though not always a significant presence in the chimp's day-to-day
routine. After leaving Oklahoma, Nim was installed in the home of Stephanie
LaFarge, where he became part of a household that included seven children,
at least one dog and Ms. LaFarge's husband, a poet and "rich hippie" who
appears to have been Nim's romantic rival.

Ms. LaFarge, an open and genial interview subject, drops a few casual
bombshells testifying to what the psychobabble of our own time might call
boundary issues. "It was the '70s," her now grown-up daughter Jenny Lee
says, but even then, and even on the Upper West Side, it might have been a
bit unusual for a woman to breastfeed a baby chimpanzee.

After a while, Nim was transferred to an estate in Riverdale, cared for
and tutored by young people -- most of them women -- who come before Mr. Marsh's camera in middle age to recall the pleasures and dangers of working
with their spirited simian charge. It is hard not to be charmed by the
affection that passes between these humans and the chimp, or to appreciate
what seems to be a reciprocated effort at communication. But at the same
time it is difficult to avoid a certain queasiness at the sight of a wild
creature forcibly and irrevocably alienated from his nature -- dressed in
clothes, tethered and caged, smoking a joint out in the woods with his pals.
You laugh, sometimes, to force the lump out of your throat.

There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was
loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain
themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism.
He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be
snagged on some of its ethical thorns. He also engages in a bit of
manipulation, using sleight-of-hand re-enactments and Dickon Hinchliffe's
nerve-rackingly melodramatic score to sensationalize a drama that hardly
requires it.

Mr. Marsh, whose last documentary was the lovely, Oscar-winning "Man
on Wire," is a patient listener and an able storyteller, but the subject
of "Project Nim" is so rich and strange that it might have benefited from
the hand of a wilder, bolder filmmaker. An obsessive like
Errol Morris or Werner Herzog might
have pushed beyond pathos and curiosity, deeper into the literal no man's
land that lies between us and our estranged animal relations. But it is also
possible that our language and our science do not equip us to understand the
truth about Nim -- or the truth about us that he may have discovered through
years of rigorous, involuntary research.

Directed by James Marsh; based on the book "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who
Would Be Human" by Elizabeth Hess; director of photography, Michael Simmonds;
edited by Jinx Godfrey; music by Dickon Hinchliffe; produced by Simon Chinn;
released by Roadside Attractions/HBO Documentary Films. Running time: 1 hour
33 minutes.